Month: April 2021

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Tech Help: Fixing a Photographer’s Nightmare

I turned on my computer this meta Monday morning and was greeted with the following message in the black and white boot screen:

WARNING: Please back-up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent and cause unpredictable fail.

It seems that my life never fails to present me with timely topics to write about.

But you ask, why am I writing about computer tech problems on a cast iron blog?

If you are an outdoors guy like me or just love to take photos and video of your travel adventures, chances are you too have gigabytes of media stored in fragile spaces.

Yet, all of this epic computer fail wasn’t necessarily a surprise.

When I built myself a new computer a few years ago I had salvaged my data backup drive from my old machine. It was a two terabyte drive that also happened to be where I stored all my photos and my music library. I popped it out of the old and dropped it into the new, and voila… all my media were on the new computer. Yet over the last couple weeks, working from home from this machine, some odd noises have been emitting from the big black box and I’ve been a terrible techie and basically ignored the early warning signs.

Imminent hard drive failure warnings are something like a stage four cancer diagnosis for your computer. You don’t deal with that stuff tomorrow… you act. Today.

Now, to be clear, I do have a cloud backup of all those photos in case of an epic emergency like a fire or a flood, and local backups scattered across old hard drives and such, but my core library is… well, was this drive.

I write “was” because as of this morning that first action step was to immediately start to move all that data to a newer drive…. all seven hundred plus gigabytes of what I hadn’t copied already. (The music files are up next and that’s also nearly a terabyte of data I need to contend with!) All in all, I’m looking at about six hours of data migration today in a race against the ticking timebomb of my hard drive giving up and deciding not to work anymore. A race against a fragile piece of equipment which I need to push to its very limits by copying every last byte of data it has stored inside it. A recipe for a technical nightmare.

Cue the epic action movie soundtrack:

Hard Drives are not Cast Iron…

They are the exact opposite actually… temporary, fragile, and mysterious in their operation. Even so, I use the former every day to share my love of the latter.

So, if you got here by Googling and are mid-panic and wondering how to deal with this kind of error yourself, here’s my advice:

First, stop whatever else you are doing and get that data off the failing hard drive. Put it on another hard disk in your machine. Put it on an external drive. Drag it onto another computer. Move it to memory cards. Push it to USB sticks. Write it onto recordable media like DVDs or even CDs if that’s what you have handy. Whatever you can do to save all those precious files, particularly files you don’t have other copies of, cannot replace, or would be time consuming or expensive to restore. Save as much data as you can first.

Second, figure out a backup solution (or two). Backup external hard drives are fairly inexpensive these days and even a hundred bucks to store a decade worth of photos and video is a relatively small investment to protect your memories and work. Free cloud storage products are hard to find anymore, but if you don’t mind paying a hundred bucks a year you can store a lot of data with Apple or Google or Dropbox or any of a dozen reputable companies who will keep your data safe in their datacentres. Watch for fees for things often called “data egress” which means you pay extra to download those files when you need them back.

Third, don’t mess around with broken drives. Get that old hard drive out of your system and replace it. There are lots of software programs that claim to fix or restore failing drives, but too often these are temporary fixes at best, fixes that give you time to nab your data before it’s done for good.

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Should you take walk breaks while running?

Back in 2012 I ran my first travel-based half marathon.

My wife and I had hopped on a plane and spent a long weekend in Las Vegas where the race had shut down the strip and some tens of thousands of runners ran through the Nevada evening basked in glow of more neon than I’d ever seen in one place.

With a burst of fireworks I pushed out of the start line and headed south and outbound, past the famous Welcome to Las Vegas sign, pacing myself for twenty one klicks amongst the hoards of runners. I was feeling good. I was running strong. Everything was great. The air. The music. The vibe. The colours. The lights.

Then my watch beeped …and I took my first walk break.

Y’know. Just like I’d been training to do.

Ten minutes running followed by one minute of brisk recovery walk, repeated until the end of the run. It’s how I’d practiced. It was my race plan. It was intentional.

It was only after a fellow racer dressed as Elvis Presley pulled up alongside to ask me if I was alright and a couple other concerned folks patted me on the shoulder to encourage me to “stay strong buddy” did I realize that how my Canadian run club had been training me for the previous few years was not the universal approach… even a few hours away just down in the States.

Nearly ten years later, and even this morning on our fourteen kilometer run through the spring river valley, we still tend to take walk breaks on our long and simple training runs.

Ten minutes of on-pace running followed by one minute of brisk recovery walk.

Ten and ones.

I’m sure there is some science that could be found online about the training benefits of walk-run intervals, the value of mid-run recovery, the advantages of training for time-on-feet versus pace, or even how it’s tough to take a water break without choking if you don’t stop and slow down for at least a few steps.

And I have many personal anecdotes about passing fellow racers on the back half of the course, runners who leapfrogged past me on my first couple walk breaks but who faltered in their pace an hour or so on. I’ve even raced both with and without breaks, and invariably I always do better with my regular recovery walks worked into the pace.

Or, I could just tell you how nice it is to enjoy the scenery of a minute-long walk through the woods or across a bridge, maybe snapping a photo or two to remember the moment.

There are reasons.

None of those reasons matters much, of course, other than to say I’ve got my own list of rationalizations for why taking walk breaks on long training runs has worked well for both my crew and I over the years. It was how we were taught by the store-based club we started running out of. It’s become habit. We’ve all had a decade-plus-long running career backed by an interval setting on our watches. I don’t see it changing. Also, I like it.

Walks are not for everyone, of course. Highly competitive racers likely turn their noses at recreational runners like us. (Those folks are not reading this advice anyhow. ) If you’ve found this post because you searched for advice on if it’s okay to take breaks while you run then you’ve come to the crux of my point. Yes. It’s fine. Better than fine, in fact, if it means you can run longer or further than you could without those breaks. Maybe walking is even a good idea, if by walking you even slightly reduce your chance for injury by overstress. Walking is okay.

This is not meant to be advice. Every runner is different. Every training program is unique. Every kilometer run has a purpose and a challenge. Do your own research and learn your body.

That said, I do believe from years of personal experience that walk breaks can find a place somewhere in that mix and interval walk breaks might be the ingredient you need to train longer distances or simply find enjoyment of the sport through the blurry push for always faster and ever harder.

I finished that Las Vegas half marathon strong. I’ll never actually know how Elvis found himself managing his own pace in the second half of that twenty-one kilometer race. Part of me likes to believe that in one of the fifty-or-so white sequined jumpsuits that I passed through that evening’s run was that guy who (as nice as he was for stopping to check) thought I’d buffed it ten minutes into the race.

Cuz I didn’t.

I was just taking a break, enjoying both the race and the neon.

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Caged Flame

It was Saturday afternoon and for the first time in a week there was nary a spot of snow in my backyard.

We had some pork loin marinating in the refrigerator and my wife was all “I was just going to cook it in the oven but if it’s nice enough out there you could barbecue.”

“Or I could try it over a fire.” I offered.

“You could.” She was skeptical. “But you’re the one who has to sit out there and tend to it.”

Despite the snow there have been a number of fire restrictions in place across the prairies.

No open fires. No fireworks. But carefully tended pits are fine… provided certain rules are followed.

Rules, such as using a fire screen cover atop your fire pit.

Caging your flames.

I cracked open a beer as the fire burned to a good base of hot coals. I’ve been working my way through a Grizzly Paw sampler pack since we visited the mountains last month and I picked up the beer right there at the microbrewery in Canmore.

This afternoon’s selection was called the Three Sisters Pale Ale, named for the triple peak mountain range that stands guard over the townsite below, down where the beer is brewed.

It was a fitting spring drink to complement the first burn of the new batch of firewood and a reward for hauling a cubic meter of logs from my driveway to the storage space behind the shed earlier this week.

Let’s also call it the small makeup drink from the alcohol-free hangover I endured on Thursday, the morning after joining club AstraZenenca and priming up my immune system against a future COVID invasion. No regrets, but that vaccine wasn’t giving free rides to many.

My caged flames burned down to a smoky bed of embers and I cautiously added a bit more wood and some charcoal to maintain the heat level.

My low-smoke firepit and the so-called clean burning cedar is belching smoke into the neighbourhood and likely annoying my neighbours.

I should really focus. Tend those wild flames and pay a little less attention to my can of cold, crisp pale ale brewed in the mountains.

I should. It’s fine though.

“The smoke smells kinda nice.” My wife says as she comes outside to check on the progress of the cook and his fire. “Better than that pine we had before.”

“I guess.” I say, but smoke is smoke even if it smells less bad than other smoke.

I would just invite the neighbours over for a beer. No one minds smoke as much with a beer in their hand. But that vaccine doesn’t really kick in for a couple more weeks and even more restrictive than the local fire rules are the pandemic ones.

The pork loin hits the hot cast iron grates and the sizzling, spicy sounds fill the backyard and for a few minutes as I turn and prod and manage the heat against raw flesh I forget. Forget it all.

The smoke.

The neighbourhood.

The disease ravaging the world.

The cage is off, the flame unleashed, so that I can just cook.

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A Gift of Bread

Since the pandemic began I’ve been baking a lot of sourdough.

In fact, on my way home over a year ago from my last day in the office and even as we transitioned into working-from-home mode, I stopped at the grocery store and restocked my flour supply. Then as I checked into my kitchen and fed my starter, I kicked off the first of what now accounts for almost two hundred loaves of bread.

All of it was practical. All of it was a kind of food security during a time of uncertainty. All of it was for ourselves.

And then about a month ago as we were passing through on our way to the mountains and stopping for a brief puppy-pee-break at the in-laws house, I had bagged a loaf of fresh-from-the-oven sourdough and handed it off to my mother-in-law.

A gift of bread.

The practicality of that gesture was simply that a loaf of bread was best eaten fresh by someone who would enjoy it, rather than left on our counter while we spent the weekend on mini-holiday.

The emotional aspect was that my mother-in-law had been halfway teasing that I should stop bragging about all my bread and posting photos of it on the socials if I wasn’t going to start offering to deliver to their house (an hour and a half drive away!)

So I delivered.

And this resulted in a text message the next day thanking us for the short visit and the gift, and suggesting it was probably the best bread she’d had in about a year. Great!

Food of any kind, but particularly food one has personally made, is linked to a long history of human gift giving. It is probably one of the most foundationally human things we do: make something worth eating, then give it our family, friends, or… everyone.

I had been baking bread casually in the years leading into the pandemic, and often the loaves I created were shortcuts to contributing to communal meals: something to bring to a gathering or a picnic or a thanksgiving dinner. And apart from a few gluten-adverse acquaintances, sourdough is simple enough to satisfy almost anyone, like the friend who cannot eat eggs, or my vegan pals, or even the picky folks who don’t like spicy food. Sourdough is just so basic… and yet robust enough to hold its own in that long human tradition of sharing your food with others.

There is both a universality to bread and an implied effort with sourdough. Almost everyone’s eyes light with an “Oh! You brought fresh bread!?” as you pull it from a bag and start slicing it up.

That same mother-in-law (though I only have one) put in a request earlier this week. One of our extended family just got some sad medical news (details redacted) and she was hoping we could make a delivery this weekend.

A gift of bread.

Of course we can.